We have a small environment where a dedicated System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 server is used to back up everything; the server has no performance problems and plenty of hardware resources available.

We also have a Hyper-V cluster, and would like to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 to manage it; but, for obvious reasons, we would like to avoid to run this software on a VM inside the same cluster it manages. However, we are quite short of other physical servers at the moment.

Can SCVMM 2012 and SCDPM 2012 run on the same server, assuming adequate hardware resources are available for both of them? This page says that DPM can't coexist with Operations Manager, but it says nothing at all about other System Center products.

Also: if they can run on the same sarver, can they share the same SQL Server instance? I think the answer to this is "no", because DPM does very peculiar things with its database... but, anyway, it would be nice to not have to install another SQL Server instance.

Running management software for a virtualized environment inside a VM is not as uncommon as you think. Lots of people of use vmware vCenter inside a VM (or the vcenter appliance).
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pauskaOct 12 '12 at 19:43

I know. But vCenter has been there for years and always supported this way, while SCVMM is... quite a less mature product :-/
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MassimoOct 13 '12 at 14:13

2 Answers
2

In the past Microsoft has strongly recommended against installing DPM and other System Center components together on the same server. From what I have read and from conversations with Microsoft Support, they have concerns about disk and memory I/O contention along with data security issues.

I've had colleagues call for DPM support and been given a hard time when Microsoft discovered the mix of DPM and other System Center applications. Microsoft will help but with the big caveat, "This is not a support configuration and we may require you to uninstall the other software to troubleshoot or resolve the problems."

I do not take risks with the data my company relies on for business continuity and disaster recovery.